COMRADE Ratan Budhar, 72, a senior member of the CPI(M) Maharashtra state committee and vice-president of the AIKS Maharashtra state council has passed away on December 19 due to a lung ailment. He was also a member of the Party’s Thane-Palghar district secretariat and president of the AIKS Thane-Palghar district council. He will be remembered as an extraordinary comrade who devoted over 50 years of his life to the Red Flag. 

IN the United States there are still four million persons who remain unemployed compared to before the pandemic; and yet the Biden administration’s attempt to stimulate the economy has already run into a crisis with the re-emergence of inflation not just in that country but elsewhere in the capitalist world as well. The Federal Reserve Board (the equivalent of the US central bank) is planning soon to raise interest rates (that are currently close to zero), and even the fiscal expansion will be difficult to sustain in the face of inflation.

ELECTRICITY employees and engineers of Jammu and Kashmir achieved a major victory after a valiant struggle through an indefinite strike call from December 17-18 midnight against the move to privatise the power sector that has been initiated through the formation of a joint venture company with J&K Power Transmission Corporation Limited (PTCL) and Power Grid Corporation of India Limited (PGCIL).The national chapter of the National Coordination Committee of Electricity Employees and Engineers (NCCOEEE) conveyed its warm greetings and salute to all electricity employees and engineers of Ja

IN a recent report the People’s Commission on the Public Sector and Public Services has rightly drawn attention to the sheer un-constitutionality of the Modi government’s plan to privatise en masse the assets of the public sector. The constitution of the country is not just a set of procedures and rules for the governance of the polity. It expresses above all a certain social philosophy which is supposed to inform the behaviour of the various organs of the State and which constitutes the foundational beliefs around which the nation has come into being.

CPI(M) Polit Bureau has issued the following statement on December 21THE recommendations of the Jammu & Kashmir Delimitation Commission are patently unjustified and illogical.As per 2011 Census, Kashmir’s population is 68.8 lakhs, while Jammu’s is 53.5 lakhs.  As per the proposal, Kashmir gets 47 assembly seats and Jammu 43.  A fair delimitation should have given 51 seats out of 90 to Kashmir.Further, the constitution of the Delimitation Commission under the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Act 2019 in itself is questionable, as the Reorganisation Act has been